


A Life of Starvation

by LivingInFiction



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: "First kiss", Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Difficulties to Adjust to New Life, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Healing, Intimacy, It would totally feel like a first kiss after so many years, It's been 71 years guys, M/M, Natasha Romanov is the Best, Pre-Trip to Wakanda, Rehabilitation, Strangers to Friends, Stucky - Freeform, T'Challa is Mentionned, Touch-Starved Bucky, Trauma, adapting to the 21st century, old habits die hard, soft steve rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 16:21:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15416859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LivingInFiction/pseuds/LivingInFiction
Summary: After seven decades spent as a brainwashed killing machine and two years spent as a fugitive, how can you know who you really are?How can you remember, when your memories are so blurry that you wonder if you didn't dream them?How can you feel again after such a life?Sometimes, it only takes one person.





	A Life of Starvation

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a couple months ago for a friend who was devasted after she watched Infinity War. Since I hadn't watched the movie yet, I told her I could write her something to comfort her if she wanted to, so she asked me to write about Bucky and Steve, because "anything would be just fine compared to what the movie did".   
> So I ended up writing this in hope it would comfort her, but little did I know back then how true her words were... that is until I watched the movie 2 weeks later.  
> Since then I've been living a life full of denial, and decided to post this fanfiction as to accentuate how much I deny everything that happened since the movie-which-must-not-be-named appeared in our lives.
> 
> Also my summary sounds way more promising than what I wrote XD

Among everything Bucky went through, having to live with one arm was the hardest to accommodate to. He hated it. Even though the robotic limb reminded him constantly of the years spent as a slave, a killing machine used and brainwashed by Hydra, everyday things were harder to accomplish for him. He still felt the ghost of his left arm when he tried to grab things with both of his hands, when he wanted to dress up or scratch the back of his neck. It was kind of shameful for someone like him, a soldier, to get flustered by such little things when he still was one of Hydra’s best agents a couple years ago.

Yet there he was, helped by the Avengers no less. Especially by the great Captain America and and deadly Black Widow. He wasn’t surprised that Steve still tried his best to make him comfortable enough until his trip to Wakanda — “We have the technology to make you a new arm, it’s the least I can do after what I made you go through,” had said Prince T’Challa — but he couldn’t quite tell why Agent Romanov wanted to help as well. He remembered when they both fought, her sharp movements and close combat skills, it wasn’t something that could have built a strong enough bond between two people. Not normal ones at the very least. He had the feeling that she did it because of her close friendship with Steve; she seemed to understand ‘Captain America’ more than anyone else in the team. 

He didn’t mind her company though, he surprisingly came to like it. She came from time to time, whenever her missions allowed her to, and they conversed about the world. Yet too many times he found himself speaking in Russian, because he couldn’t get rid of the language, of the words that were still imprinted in his mind. She always adapted to how he went back and forth between the two languages without asking a question, almost as if she knew too well what he went through. He appreciated that. Hadn’t she helped him, he would have found it troubling, if not hard, to adapt to an era he barely knew. She was patient and kind enough to show him things, to explain and to answer his questions — to joke with him even and, God, did it feel right to be able to laugh again.

When Natasha couldn’t come, Steve would be the one to visit him at the flat he was temporarily staying at. It was better than the one he lived in before, but still too materialist to his taste when he spent months living with barely enough to make it. He knew it was Steve’s way to make him comfortable, to help him relax, and he would if his mind could adapt faster to this new life. When Steve came one day and found that most of the furnitures had been put in his bedroom, the one room where he felt the least at ease, so that he could live in the living room only surrounded by his sofa, the small coffee table and numerous piles of books. The ‘Captain’ managed to smile softly and act like nothing was wrong. Yet he knew. He knew it made Steve distressed because he wanted to do more but didn’t know what. That’s when he started to visit more often. When the couple hours turned into eight. When the ‘more than strangers’ turned into ‘friends again’.

Until it became more than that.

He believed Steve’s genuine warmth and kindness, despite his struggle to accept it without doubting or overanalysing it. He knew Steve, or at least he had known him in another life. His presence around him helped remember, triggered his memory; sometimes it was because of a sentence, a laugh, a look, a brush of the man’s hand or the heat of the his lips against his own. He would recall pieces of both of their lives before war, when they were just two boys from Brooklyn, running and laughing in the streets as they played together, the years spent watching Steve’s back because he was that skinny, weak yet headstrong kind of guy. He remembered the increasing flutters of his heart as they grew into men. How he couldn’t bring himself to stop being so close to him. The haunting of Steve’s face when women who were too beautiful for their own good were hitting on him. 

But then war happened, transformed his memory in a blur of battles and ghostly figures hovering over him. So Steve told him everything, things that even the museum hadn’t been able to answer to: the training, the serum, the rescue team he formed to save him, them fighting Hydra side by side, the all so sudden love confession after one too many glass of booze, Steve’s febrile answer to his feelings, the stolen kisses, the intimates embraces late at night, the train, the incident, the remorse.

Maybe it was then that Bucky went to kiss him for the ‘first’ time, pushed by his own instinct when he saw Steve’s calm facade slowly break because of his failure to protect him from Hydra. He had been sitting on the ground the whole time he listened to him, the coffee table between them, when Steve was sitting on the sofa. His body had seemed to moved on its own, he was almost kneeling on the small piece of furniture and he would probably have lost his balance, if it weren’t for the hand that rested at the nape of Steve’s neck. He saw him hold his breath, an old habit of him, he recalled. It seemed he hadn’t been able to get rid of it, even after years of being the brave and confident ‘Captain America’. His watery, blue eyes stared at him, looking for something in his own dark gaze. Maybe he found it — that part of the Bucky from the past he desperately clung to — or maybe he didn’t. 

Steve still let him do as wished, let him take his time and welcomed the chapped lips against his own. It was a chaste, almost timid kiss, if Bucky was indeed still able to be shy after all these years. The man answered to the kiss with all the tenderness he was able to show, clearly acting like the gentleman he had always been. There was no rush, only the relish of their intimacy. 

It was so addictive. It was like picking up an old habit, like the first inhale of a cigarette after weeks of restraint, except it had actually been decades of being forcibly forbidden any intimacy, any human warmth. It was only when he felt Steve’s hand cup his face that he realised how touch-starved he had been for so long. How he had subconsciously missed Steve’s touch. Steve’s smell. Steve.

All of Steve.

Living with a missing arm wasn’t easy, but missing Steve had been the hardest thing to go through. It was something he never wished to live again, and if he had to fight against the whole world to never leave his side, he would. Because he was a soldier, and soldier fought in the name of who they loved. Because Steve was all he had. Because he was with him, ‘till the end of the line.

**Author's Note:**

> Then Bucky was brought to Wakanda where he was fully healed. He raised his goats happily with his boyfriend Steve under the Wakandan sun and they never had to worry about anything ever again.  
> THE END.
> 
> If you notice grammar mistakes or mispelled words, please do tell me and I'll correct it ASAP! :)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
